Pseudolaw
Pseudolegal arguments deviate significantly from most conventional understandings of law and jurisprudence and often originate from non-existent statutes or legal principles the advocate or adherent incorrectly believes exist.
[5] Netolitzky has compared pseudolaw to "a form of legal quackery or snake oil";[6] the lawyer Colin McRoberts has called it "law in a Post-Truth Era".
[12] They frequently rely on techniques and arguments promoted and sold – sometimes as "kits" – by amateur legal theorists, who are commonly called "gurus" by courts, scholars and media.
[2][8] Pseudolegal theories and schemes are disseminated and advertised through websites, isolated documents, texts of varying length, seminars, radio broadcasts, instructional DVDs and, above all, YouTube videos.
[10] It has been used to challenge certain laws, taxes and sentences, in attempts to escape debt or avoid foreclosure, as part of financial schemes, and also to deny the jurisdiction of courts or even the legitimacy of governments.
Journalists and scholars have described pseudolaw as so irrational and unorthodox that it more closely resembles magic ceremony or mental illness than any recognizable form of legitimate legal practice.
[18] The development of pseudolaw was fostered in the United States by the farm crisis of the late 20th century: from the 1980s, former North Dakota farmer Roger Elvick advocated fraudulent tax avoidance and anti-government schemes in what became known as the redemption movement.
[18] The advent of the Internet later facilitated the spreading of pseudolegal ideas and concepts,[19] which matured around 1999–2000 in the United States where they were at that point hosted by the sovereign citizen movement.
One striking feature of Irish pseudolaw is the appearance of a political party, Direct Democracy Ireland, created by Ben Gilroy, a promoter of anti-foreclosure concepts and conspiracy theories.
[20] Pseudolaw has been used by people wishing to ignore certain rules or to avoid inconveniences such as paying license fees and traffic tickets,[32] but also as a means to commit serious offenses such as tax evasion[4][33] or as part of fraudulent schemes like mortgage elimination.
[34][35][36] Some groups of sovereign citizens have created "common law courts" to handle matters regarding movement members, or to issue "judgments" devoid of legal authority against real or perceived enemies.
[37][9][38] Other sham organizations created by sovereign citizens include false "arbitration" entities, which will issue "rulings" against their client's creditors or other targets.
[41] Notably, during the yellow vests protests it was alleged that a 2016 decree had nullified the Constitution of France by infringing on the separation of powers, thus rendering Emmanuel Macron's 2017 election invalid.
Groups espousing such beliefs include the freemen on the land and the sovereign citizen movements, whose ideologies are based on idiosyncratic interpretations of "common law".
According to one version, the use of stamps transforms documents into correspondence, which is governed by the Universal Postal Union (considered by pseudolaw affiliates to be a supranational authority).
[15] The Universal Postal Union has officially denied having the authority which sovereign citizens and similar movements attribute to it, and has specified that "the use of postage stamps on legal documents does not create an opportunity or obligation for the UPU to become involved in those matters".
[58][32] The origin of that particular theory is unclear, though it may stem from the fact that some nautical-sounding terms such as "dock" or "birth (homophone with "berth") – certificate" are commonly used by English-language judiciaries.
[59] One particular theory linked to maritime concepts, and notably popular among British freemen on the land, relies on a misinterpretation of the English Cestui Que Vie Act 1666 which stated that a person missing at sea shall be assumed to be dead after seven years.
[64] American sovereign citizen and redemption guru Winston Shrout, who advocated tax resistance for twenty years and was ultimately imprisoned, mixed his pseudolegal and pseudoeconomic theories with claims that he was an "Earth delegate to the interdimensional Galactic Round Table" and a "sixth-dimensional interplanetary diplomat" and that he once disrupted international transactions by relocating the prime meridian with the assistance of the Queen of the Fairies.
[7] Christopher Hallett, from Florida, and his associate Kirk Pendergrass, from Idaho, operated a company called E-Clause which offered amateur legal services based on sovereign citizen ideology.
[67] E-Clause focused on child custody cases and was notably aimed at mothers whose children had been removed from their care; it also associated with the "Pentagon Pedophile Task Force", a QAnon-affiliated group of conspiracy theorists.
In November 2020, Hallett was murdered by one of his followers and clients, Neely Petrie-Blanchard, a QAnon adherent who had relied on him to win back custody of her children but had come to believe that he conspired against her.
The lawyer Colin McRoberts commented in 2016, after attending pseudolegal seminars held by conspiracy theorists including Winston Shrout: Pseudolaw isn’t harmless.
[71]Followers of pseudolaw can cause problems for courts and government administrators by filing unusual, numerous and voluminous applications that are difficult to process, or even to understand.
[32] However, while such methods may occasionally obtain similar results, or at least delay legal proceedings by encumbering courts,[72] they are ultimately never successful in front of a judge and a jury.
Any lack of legal success by the OPCA litigant is, of course, portrayed as a consequence of the customer’s failure to properly understand and apply the guru's special knowledge.
Rooke commented that the lawyer had violated basic professional rules by participating "in a scheme to harm the court, threaten its staff, unilaterally terminate criminal litigation.
"[78] During his 2022 trial, Darrell Brooks, perpetrator of the Waukesha Christmas parade attack, raised arguments based on sovereign citizen ideology.
[79][80][81] Judge Jennifer Dorow ruled that Brooks' pseudolegal arguments were without merit,[82] and commented that sovereign citizen theories and tactics were "nonsense" that had no place in the judicial system.
[84] In January 2024, the Supreme Court of British Columbia ruled that Arbabi's claim was frivolous and vexatious and ordered that she pay special costs for violating her professional oath.
